The Dispatch for smart phones

By Guy TrebayNEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICE • Monday June 9, 2014 6:58 AM

James Bond gets all the glory, but Pussy Galore wore it best.

There, in a photo from the movie
Goldfinger, she stands atop the wing of a small plane. Her face is framed by a honeyed
mane that was actress Honor Blackman’s glory. Her left hand rests on the aircraft. Strapped to her
wrist is a chunky Rolex GMT Master watch on a workmanlike nylon strap.

Sean Connery’s Bond, too, favored the same sturdy straps for his fine watches; it was one of the
countless sartorial fine points of Bond movies that tastemakers will be mining for eternity.
Curiously, though, the striped strap on Bond’s Rolex Submariner in
Goldfinger is skimpy — too narrow for the watch it supports. Perhaps that was the
intention . . . or maybe the prop handler was out to lunch.

Galore’s watchband, on the other hand, is scaled right for a timepiece somewhat outsize for most
women of the era, though well-calibrated for a character that in the original Ian Fleming novel was
a lesbian cat burglar running a Harlem-based girl gang called the Cement Mixers.

The watch strap is a type many call a NATO. Whether it is in fact a NATO is a subject of
considerable online debate, like most everything to do with the world of fine watches and Bond.

Named for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, though likely created for British soldiers, a
NATO is classically a length of plain woven nylon with two stainless steel loops and a metal
buckle. Like Bond or Galore, it is tough, resilient and hard to kill.

And it is a certifiable trend. At least it was during the huge Baselworld watch fair held in
Switzerland in the spring, when large numbers of watchmakers showed their costly wares on NATO
straps.

Watch purists hate them. NATO straps “don’t belong on any watch that costs more than the strap,”
sniffed one professed online arbiter known as the Watch Snob.